Trump says Kim ready to talk
‘Long letter’ also held ‘apology’ for missile tests, he tweets
BERKELEY HEIGHTS, N.J. — President Donald Trump said Saturday that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un wants to meet once again to “start negotiations” after joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises end. He also said Kim apologized for the flurry of recent short-range missile tests that has rattled U.S. allies in the region.
In a pair of morning tweets from his resort in Bedminster, N.J., where he arrived late Friday for a 10-day vacation, Trump said Kim in a letter objected to the exercises and suggested the missile tests would end once the drills, which began last week, are finished.
“It was a long letter, much of it complaining about the ridiculous and expensive exercises,” Trump wrote, asserting that the letter amounted to “a small apology for testing the short range missiles.”
North Korea on Saturday fired what appeared to be two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea, according to South Korea’s military — the fifth round of launches in less than three weeks.
“I look forward to seeing Kim Jong Un in the not too distant future!” Trump wrote.
The two leaders have met three times — in Singapore, Hanoi, Vietnam, and at the Korean Demilitarized Zone — but critics say Trump has received few concessions in the standoff over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for the meetings.
At their second summit in Vietnam in February, Trump rejected Kim’s demand for widespread sanctions relief in exchange for dismantling the North’s main nuclear complex, a partial disarmament step.
The U.S. and South Korea have scaled down their major military exercises since Trump and Kim’s first summit in June 2018. But the North insists even the downsized drills violate agreements between Kim and Trump and compel it to “develop, test and deploy the powerful physical means essential for national defense.”
When they last met in June of this year, Trump and Kim agreed to resume working-level nuclear talks that have been stalled since February, but there have been no known meetings between the two sides since then.
Last week, Trump repeated a complaint that South Korea had been paying “very little” for the presence of U.S. troops in its country and said it had now agreed to pay “substantially more.” Experts say the alliance brings tremendous benefits in terms of U.S. security.
“Sends the wrong message to our allies. Security at a price? That’s not who we are and plays into Kim’s (China’s) hands,” tweeted James Zimmerman, a leading U.S. lawyer and business leader based in Beijing.
“The comment alone is potentially destabilizing and sounds like a mob shakedown. Seoul’s security is very much a global security issue, at whatever the cost,” Zimmerman added.
Trump has raised concerns about the costs of U.S. military relations with South Korea, Japan and other allies.
The North has launched five short-range missile tests over the past three weeks, raising alarms in Seoul and Tokyo, which are locked in their own trade dispute that has essentially frozen diplomatic relations between them. South Korea has threatened to end an intelligence-sharing agreement with Japan.
Trump maintained that the short-range tests, while a potential violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, do not cross a verbal agreement he said Kim made in Singapore to stop testing long-range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons as long as the negotiations were continuing.